Quick, what's the number for 911?

The show: Boston Legal
The episode: "Oral Contracts," the eighth episode of Season 4.
What happened: Denny gets arrested for soliciting a gay prostitute in a courthouse restroom, and asks Alan Shore to represent him. Naturally, Denny considers his predicament an "emergency," and says so in a conversation with Alan and Lorraine (Saffron Burrows), who is running to an elevator, and who concludes the conversation casually suggesting they should call 999. Katie (Tara Summers) happens to overhear the conversation, and the mention of 999, the emergency phone number in England, reinforces her sneaking suspicion that Lorraine is in fact British and has worked to disguise her provenance.
Katie encounters Lorraine at the firm's library and confronts her about her past. Lorraine reveals that in England she was married to a Pakistani man, whom she cheated on. Her "co-adulterer" died in an 'accident,' prompting Lorraine to move to America to escape the 'honor' killing. Lorraine asks Katie to keep her confidence, but Katie tells her colleague Whitney, who has dug up some information on Lorraine.
Meanwhile, Shirley represents a shock jock fired from his station for making fun of old people.
What doesn't make sense: Ignoring for now the idea that male adulterers are ever the subject of 'honor' killings (after all, the 'accident' could have been meant only for Lorraine, or it could be the case that the "co-adulterer" is in fact a woman), does it make sense that Lorraine would continue to think of the emergency phone number as 999 rather than 911? This sort of mistake would be understandable from almost any other Brit expatriate, but given what we just learned of Lorraine's background, it's ridiculous. Think about it: this woman goes to the trouble of learning to speak with an American accent, yet she doesn't bother to fix it on her mind that the emergency phone number is 911 here. When she sees some Pakistanis closing in on her house (a distinct possibility given that she chastised Katie for putting her life in danger with her disclosure to Whitney), can Lorraine afford the delay of fumbling with the wrong number?
Or it could be that Lorraine has programmed the emergency button on her phone to 911, but then doesn't it occur to her that she could ever have to call the police from some other phone? Or maybe she just said 999 because she knew Katie was listening and wanted to tip her off. But why?

Not as funny in the recycling

The show: Boston Legal
The episode: "Do Tell," the fourth episode of Season 4.
What happened: Miguel Obispo (Rolando Molina) wants to take his son to Mexico so that the child may participate in more bullfighting matches, but the mother refuses out of concern that their son could die in the arena, so Miguel goes to Crane, Poole & Schmidt for legal representation. Since Miguel can't speak English even though he understands it, a nun translates for him in court.
Meanwhile, Shirley represents General Mark Fitzgerald (Sam McMurray), a gay soldier, closeted for most of his career, who now wants to sue the Army over its "don't ask don't tell policy."
What doesn't quite make sense: The character of Miguel Obispo had been introduced in the previous episode, "The Chicken and the Leg," which established that Miguel understands English but can only speak Spanish. Even if we buy the idea that such people exist (most native Spanish speakers I know have made at least some effort to speak English), didn't it occur to the writers that the translating nun might be getting tiresome to the viewers? This time, we even see that Miguel realizes that the nun has gotten off track into sexual double entendre, and the joke is much less satisfying because the double entendre is at a somewhat farther remove from what Miguel said. Though I'm basing that assessment on my limited knowledge of Spanish; regardless, using the translating nun again is contrived and unfunny.
And another thing: Judge Brown's ruling at the end is a nice bit of fantasy. On the other hand, it does leave some bit of ambiguity for the Army: to leave that fine soldier "alone" could very well mean to punish him in other ways, like giving him some very crappy non-command duty.

Senior partner does HR stuff

In "Beauty and the Beast," the Season 4 opener for Boston Legal, Shirley Schmidt (Candice Bergen) sticks the new associate Katie Lloyd (Tara Summers) in Jerry Espenson's office, explaining that Jerry (Christian Clemenson) had volunteered to share his office with the newest hire on account of office space being in short supply. From the start it seemed to me like a plot contrivance to put these two characters in the same office, given that lawyers at big firms typically get their own offices all to themselves, even associates fresh out of law school.

Well, that being a contrivance was confirmed in the next episode, "The Innocent Man," in which Shirley hires Lorraine Weller (Saffron Burrows), the very lawyer who had opposed Alan Shore (James Spader) in the previous episode, trying to get Shirley to pay up the money she had pledged to Stanford University. Carl Sack (John Larroquette) goes to Lorraine's new office to drool at her as she works on her new office's decor. Maybe another lawyer got fired in between the two episodes and for some reason Shirley didn't want to mention it in telling Alan that Lorraine had been hired. Still, it seems to me like an important little detail got past the story editor and the producers.

The invisible secretaries

In the real world, much of what happens in the business world wouldn't occur without the hard work of the secretaries. In the legal profession, for example, it is sometimes joked that it is the clerks, couriers and secretaries who actually make justice happen. Yet, in the legal dramas on television, secretaries are conspicuously absent.

Sure, on Ally McBeal there is Elaine Vassal (Jane Krakowski), but from my understanding of the pilot episode, she's a secretary only for the title character, who is a new associate at the firm. Since she's a busybody, it is easy to get the impression that she's the secretary for all the lawyers in the firm. But with all the different people milling about the offices of Cage & Fish, surely John and Richard each have their own secretaries, too.

On The Practice it made sense for Donnell & Associates to only have one secretary in the first season: Rebecca Washington (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who later turned out to be a law student going to school at night who then gets to try cases, and whose secretarial duties are taken over by Lucy Hatcher (Marla Sokoloff). Perhaps it is Boston Legal which has come closest to showing how vital legal secretaries are to the success of the lawyers they work for. For Alan Shore (James Spader), his secretary's desk practically had a revolving door through which went several people, including a young woman who accused him of sexual harassment, golden girl Catherine Piper (Betty White) and Clarence (Gary Anthony Williams), a cross-dressing black man. The latter turned out to also become a lawyer, as if perhaps to suggest that only as attorneys do legal professionals reach their fullest potential.

JAG is not a David E. Kelley production, but even there we see only one true secretary: Lt. Harriet Sims (Karri Turner). I know about Chegwidden's yeoman (first the Smithersly Tiner, then Coates), but that was more like a receptionist than a secretary; it was Sims who had the real secretarial duties.

It is understandable that we don't see secretaries much on the various incarnations of Law & Order. Maybe New York's court system can afford secretaries for the district attorneys, but likely not for the public defenders. When the cops barge in on private defense attorneys, the writers and/or directors choose not to show us the cops bypassing the receptionists and secretaries. In the episode in which former Will & Grace star Eric McCormack appeared as a 'sugar daddy' suspected of killing his 'sugar baby,' however, we did see the rich man's secretary running interference between the cops and her boss.